"Critical thinking is the ability to think about one's thinking in such a way as 1. To recognize its strengths and weaknesses and, as a result, 2. To recast the thinking in improved form" (Center for Critical Thinking, 1996c ).

Perhaps the simplest definition is offered by Beyer (1995) : "Critical thinking... means making reasoned judgments" (p. 8). Basically, Beyer sees critical thinking as using criteria to judge the quality of something, from cooking to a conclusion of a research paper. In essence, critical thinking is a disciplined manner of thought that a person uses to assess the validity of something (statements, news stories, arguments, research, etc.).

Characteristics of Critical Thinking

Wade (1995) identifies eight characteristics of critical thinking. Critical thinking involves asking questions, defining a problem, examining evidence, analyzing assumptions and biases, avoiding emotional reasoning, avoiding oversimplification, considering other interpretations, and tolerating ambiguity. Dealing with ambiguity is also seen by Strohm & Baukus (1995) as an essential part of critical thinking, "Ambiguity and doubt serve a critical-thinking function and are a necessary and even a productive part of the process" (p. 56).

Another characteristic of critical thinking identified by many sources is metacognition. Metacognition is thinking about one's own thinking. More specifically, "metacognition is being aware of one's thinking as one performs specific tasks and then using this awareness to control what one is doing" (Jones & Ratcliff, 1993, p. 10 ).

In the book, Critical Thinking, Beyer elaborately explains what he sees as essential aspects of critical thinking. These are:

Dispositions: Critical thinkers are skeptical, open-minded, value fair-mindedness, respect evidence and reasoning, respect clarity and precision, look at different points of view, and will change positions when reason leads them to do so.

Criteria: To think critically, must apply criteria. Need to have conditions that must be met for something to be judged as believable. Although the argument can be made that each subject area has different criteria, some standards apply to all subjects. "... an assertion must... be based on relevant, accurate facts; based on credible sources; precise; unbiased; free from logical fallacies; logically consistent; and strongly reasoned" (p. 12).

Reasoning: The ability to infer a conclusion from one or multiple premises. To do so requires examining logical relationships among statements or data.

Point of View: The way one views the world, which shapes one's construction of meaning. In a search for understanding, critical thinkers view phenomena from many different points of view.

Procedures for Applying Criteria: Other types of thinking use a general procedure. Critical thinking makes use of many procedures. These procedures include asking questions, making judgments, and identifying assumptions.

Why Teach Critical Thinking?

Oliver & Utermohlen (1995) see students as too often being passive receptors of information. Through technology, the amount of information available today is massive. This information explosion is likely to continue in the future. Students need a guide to weed through the information and not just passively accept it. Students need to "develop and effectively apply critical thinking skills to their academic studies, to the complex problems that they will face, and to the critical choices they will be forced to make as a result of the information explosion and other rapid technological changes" (Oliver & Utermohlen, p. 1 ).

As mentioned in the section, Characteristics of Critical Thinking , critical thinking involves questioning. It is important to teach students how to ask good questions, to think critically, in order to continue the advancement of the very fields we are teaching. "Every field stays alive only to the extent that fresh questions are generated and taken seriously" (Center for Critical Thinking, 1996a ).

Beyer sees the teaching of critical thinking as important to the very state of our nation. He argues that to live successfully in a democracy, people must be able to think critically in order to make sound decisions about personal and civic affairs. If students learn to think critically, then they can use good thinking as the guide by which they live their lives.

Teaching Strategies to Help Promote Critical Thinking

The 1995, Volume 22, issue 1, of the journal, Teaching of Psychology , is devoted to the teaching critical thinking. Most of the strategies included in this section come from the various articles that compose this issue.

CATS (Classroom Assessment Techniques): Angelo stresses the use of ongoing classroom assessment as a way to monitor and facilitate students' critical thinking. An example of a CAT is to ask students to write a "Minute Paper" responding to questions such as "What was the most important thing you learned in today's class? What question related to this session remains uppermost in your mind?" The teacher selects some of the papers and prepares responses for the next class meeting.

Cooperative Learning Strategies: Cooper (1995) argues that putting students in group learning situations is the best way to foster critical thinking. "In properly structured cooperative learning environments, students perform more of the active, critical thinking with continuous support and feedback from other students and the teacher" (p. 8).

Case Study /Discussion Method: McDade (1995) describes this method as the teacher presenting a case (or story) to the class without a conclusion. Using prepared questions, the teacher then leads students through a discussion, allowing students to construct a conclusion for the case.

Using Questions: King (1995) identifies ways of using questions in the classroom:

Reciprocal Peer Questioning: Following lecture, the teacher displays a list of question stems (such as, "What are the strengths and weaknesses of...). Students must write questions about the lecture material. In small groups, the students ask each other the questions. Then, the whole class discusses some of the questions from each small group.

Reader's Questions: Require students to write questions on assigned reading and turn them in at the beginning of class. Select a few of the questions as the impetus for class discussion.

Conference Style Learning: The teacher does not "teach" the class in the sense of lecturing. The teacher is a facilitator of a conference. Students must thoroughly read all required material before class. Assigned readings should be in the zone of proximal development. That is, readings should be able to be understood by students, but also challenging. The class consists of the students asking questions of each other and discussing these questions. The teacher does not remain passive, but rather, helps "direct and mold discussions by posing strategic questions and helping students build on each others' ideas" (Underwood & Wald, 1995, p. 18 ).

Use Writing Assignments: Wade sees the use of writing as fundamental to developing critical thinking skills. "With written assignments, an instructor can encourage the development of dialectic reasoning by requiring students to argue both [or more] sides of an issue" (p. 24).

Written dialogues: Give students written dialogues to analyze. In small groups, students must identify the different viewpoints of each participant in the dialogue. Must look for biases, presence or exclusion of important evidence, alternative interpretations, misstatement of facts, and errors in reasoning. Each group must decide which view is the most reasonable. After coming to a conclusion, each group acts out their dialogue and explains their analysis of it.

Spontaneous Group Dialogue: One group of students are assigned roles to play in a discussion (such as leader, information giver, opinion seeker, and disagreer). Four observer groups are formed with the functions of determining what roles are being played by whom, identifying biases and errors in thinking, evaluating reasoning skills, and examining ethical implications of the content.

Ambiguity: Strohm & Baukus advocate producing much ambiguity in the classroom. Don't give students clear cut material. Give them conflicting information that they must think their way through.

Scriven, M. & Paul, R. (1996). Defining critical thinking: A draft statement for the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking. [On-line]. Available HTTP: http://www.criticalthinking.org/University/univlibrary/library.nclk

No author, No date. Critical Thinking is ... [On-line], April 4, 1997. Available HTTP: http://library.usask.ca/ustudy/critical/

Scriven, M. & Paul, R. (1996). Defining critical thinking: A draft statement for the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking. [On-line]. Available HTTP: http://www.criticalthinking.org/University/univlibrary/library.nclk

The many fractious factions in the American education wars fight over standardized tests, teacher pay and whether we are dumber than India and China or much, much dumber than India and China. But they all agree on a single criticism of public schooling in the United States: Not enough critical thinking is being taught in our classrooms.

In pure lexical terms, “critical thinking” is “the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.” Translated into pedagogy, it’s teaching students to be intellectual mavericks, cognitive cowboys who poke bullet holes into every received concept, who duel with Aristotle and Dickinson, who are never complacent, submissive or even quiet. They brim with what Walt Whitman called “original energy.”

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Our students, according to pretty much everyone, are crappy critical thinkers. President Obama, who has generally aligned himself with education reformers and charter school advocates, has said critical thinking is a “21st-century skill” American students lack. His sometime ideological opponent, American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten, agrees, despite discounting much else in his reformist policies. Critical thinking is necessary, she said last year, “to prepare for life and citizenship, college and career.” Last year, the State University of New York at Stony Brook started a new course in news literacy, under the belief that “every student in America should acquire the critical thinking skills of a journalist.”

Stony Brook might be aghast to learn that I somehow managed to snag a desk in a newsroom without ever flashing my critical-thinking abilities, latent or otherwise, though I suspect knowing how to write a complex-compound sentence helped matters. Before turning to journalism, I taught at a selective but not quite prestigious high school in Brooklyn (it has since become the latter, in no part due to my work there). I can’t remember “critical thinking” exerting much of an influence in my English classroom. We read books, learned new words, dissected sentences to reveal the syntactic beauties underneath. Sometimes ideas were debated, but not always. Sometimes, I simply told my students things with the expectation that they accepted, remembered and, at some point, regurgitated them—like when Virgil wrote The Aeneid or the difference between who and whom. Not much critical thinking needed there.

I never praised a student for her critical thinking, nor was asked by a student about, say, critical thinking as it pertained to the third book of The Odyssey. Parents always wanted to know how their children were doing, but none ever asked about their critical thinking. It seemed, then, that critical thinking was as relevant to the English classroom as a student’s time on the mile.

Much has changed, at least in the national discussion. Today, critical thinking is often treated like a panacea, the been-there-all-along salve for our myriad pedagogical boo-boos. Common Core, the federal curriculum guidelines adopted by the vast majority of states, describes itself as “developing the critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills students will need to be successful.” The International Center for the Assessment of Higher Order Thinking, which promotes critical thinking in the classroom, says on its website that “the problems we now face, and will increasingly face, require a radically different form of thinking, thinking that is more complex, more adaptable, more sensitive to divergent points of view.”

I would more readily believe that if I understood what “critical thinking” meant. Its obverse, I suppose, is uncritical thinking, the unquestioning reception and retention of facts. Which, I hate to tell you, is supremely important in mastering any field of knowledge. Uncritical thinking is pretty unsexy, often requiring rote memorization, deadening repetition and, not infrequently, humility before intellects greater than your own (whether Louise Erdrich’s or Albert Einstein’s or just Mr. Greenberg’s during third-period geometry class). Only someone who has uncritically mastered the intricacies of Shakespeare’s verse, the social subtexts of Elizabethan society and the historical background of Hamlet is going to have any original or even interesting thoughts about the play. Everything else is just uninformed opinion lacking intellectual valence.

Look, you can be the most original, iconoclastic thinker out there. You can have deeply contrarian opinions. And those may be impressive, on the surface. But if you really want to impress me and, more important, the engineering department at Google, go ahead and think your way through this:

A function

To take the derivative of that function—the way I am sure most serious 16-year-olds in Shanghai, Helsinki and Mumbai can—you will have to have spent dozens of hours doing work of the decidedly uncritical kind, learning trigonometric rules that have been around for centuries and will almost certainly outlast your earthly existence. This is true for any discipline, whether biology or Spanish literature. There is a lot more to absorb than to critique. Before becoming a thinker, you have to be a learner.

Critical thinking, though, is sexy. It appeals to the American spirit, always in love with innovation and iconoclasm, the triumph of the individual over history and destiny, over the hoary traditions of Europe. Oh, sure, Leibniz invented calculus, but I’m pretty certain there’s an easier way to do this. We are a nation that wants to hack everything, including learning.

But despite the profusion of voices clamoring about critical thinking, a few perceptive observers have noted that an emphasis on that got us into trouble in the first place. Writing in The Boston Globe in 2009, education historian Diane Ravitch argued that “we have ignored what matters most. We have neglected to teach them that one cannot think critically without quite a lot of knowledge to think about. Thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. And a great deal of knowledge is necessary before one can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.”

Melissa Korn wrote in The Wall Street Journal last year that “mentions of critical thinking in job postings have doubled since 2009” and that in single week in October 2014, a job search site had “more than 21,000 health-care and 6,700 management postings [that] contained some reference to the skill.” Nevertheless, Korn found that “bosses stumble when pressed to describe exactly what skills make critical thinkers.”

I can’t describe a critical thinker, either. And, yeah, sure, a student who accepts everything and challenges nothing is rarely fun in the classroom, though she might be learning more than you suppose and is merely keeping quiet about it, letting her own ideas ferment in the depths of her frontal cortex. I think I can safely speak for many teachers when I reveal that nothing is more obnoxious, or ruinous, than the student so in love with his own thoughts, his own critical thinking prowess, that he drowns out all others and learns nothing as he waxes about how Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories is, like, totally a riff on The Canterbury Tales.

Just shut up, dude. Please. You might actually learn something.

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